I read that as Islam introduced women's rights that they did not have before Islam. Did I misunderstand?

Yes. I simply meant that the eaarly Islam incorporated rights that were unknown to women in many other contemporary societies. (As I understand it, at least some of those rights were a continuation of previous soceities in that area.) Most sources I can find (that I consider to be unbiased) claim that Islam became more and more oppressive to women after its first century. But I'm willing to admit that I could easily be wrong about that.

I wanted to say that I don't think it's right to say Islam maintains a relationship with women that is 13 centuries old because that relationship has varied greatly during those centuries and continues to vary greatly from place to place and people to people in the Muslim world. I agree with the general criticism about women's rights but I don't think it helps anyone to oversimplify the situation by implying (wrongly) that all of Islam has been a catatonic and uniformly bad state of affairs regarding women's rights for the past 13 centuries. (Maybe I'm just being pedantic. After all, it is true that, in general, the record of women's rights under Islam has been and continues to be very poor.)